Soudal

Soudal - Mobile Sales app

Context

The Soudal Group is the largest independent European manufacturer of sealants, adhesives and polyurethane foams for professional and private users. This Belgian family business, based in Turnhout and founded by Vic Swerts in 1966, has developed into an international player and expert in chemical construction specialities.

The group has 14 production branches on 4 continents, sales offices in 44 different countries and employs nearly 2,300 people worldwide. A long-term vision for innovation – with substantial investment in R&D – and adaptations to local market requirements have resulted in the success of the Soudal Group.

Project

In this project, Flow Pilots, together with a partner, set up a cloud-based architecture to expose Soudal’s ERP and CRM system (SAP and Microsoft Dynamics respectively) to a mobile app.

The cloud infrastructure not only interconnects the ERP and CRM system, it also manages the complexity of synchronisation with the mobile app. The architecture is robust and scalable with caching mechanisms to minimise the load on the backend. Two different synchronisation mechanisms work alongside each other: batch sync for bulk data and a robust store-and-forward mechanism for real-time communications.

The mobile application was developed from scratch, tailor-made to Soudal’s needs. The Universal Windows 10 app allows sales reps throughout Europe to consult the product range, customer details, sales history and to create new sales orders.

Azure is used to securely expose the services, to provide a scalable infrastructure and caching for SAP and CRM and to create a homogenous service layer.

In a second phase, Soudal’s webshop will be connected to the same service layer.